Daniel Lee Corwin was born in Orange County, California, on September 13, 1958, one of two children of Phil and Nancy Corwin. The family moved to Temple, Texas, where he was a Boy Scout, taught Sunday school and was said to be a good student. He suffered two severe head wounds in accidents, which psychologists later suggested had damaged his brain.
In 1975, at seventeen, he abducted a classmate at knifepoint in the high school parking lot as she got into her car, drove her in it to a remote spot and raped her, then dragged her out, cut her throat and stabbed her in the stomach and chest, and left her in a dirt pit with a board over her head covered in dirt and leaves. She survived, reached the road and was found. He was sentenced to forty years for aggravated rape, was paroled after nine, and was still on parole throughout 1987.
Alice Martin, seventy-two, a retired postmistress and the wife of a county commissioner, was taken on February 13, 1987, as she walked home to Normangee along a farm road after her daily walk. He drove her to a field in Robertson County, raped her in the front of his truck, strangled her with a ligature and stabbed her four times in the back. She was found the next day. The killing shocked the community; the Robertson County Crime Stoppers and the Normangee State Bank offered twelve thousand dollars for information. In May police looked at a murderer arrested that month, James Otto Earhart, and quickly ruled him out.
Debra Lynn Ewing, twenty-six, was abducted at gunpoint from the insurance office where she worked at the Huntsville Vision Center on July 10, 1987. He drove her into Montgomery County, raped her, strangled her with a ligature and stabbed her twice in the chest. Her body was found two days later. A witness described the man who took her in detail, and it led nowhere.
Mary Carrell Risinger, thirty-six, was washing her car at a Huntsville car wash on Halloween evening, October 31, 1987. He tried to force her into his truck; when she fought, he stabbed her in the throat, severing every major blood vessel in her neck. Her three-year-old daughter was in the car and watched. The child was not harmed. None of the three killings was connected to the others at the time.
What identified him was a woman who lived. On October 20, 1988, he abducted Wendy Gant, twenty-one, a student, from a parking lot at Olsen Field at Texas A&M University, drove her in her own car to a lonely spot near College Station, bound, raped, beat and stabbed her, tied her upright to a tree and cut her throat. She freed herself, hid until he left, and was found by a county employee. Unable to speak because of the wound, she asked for a forensic artist and worked with Karen T. Taylor in writing and by nodding yes or no. A corrections officer who knew Corwin from prison recognized the sketch. Police learned he was on parole and had stopped attending classes in May 1987, and a fingerprint on the driver's door of her car tied him to the attack.
He pleaded guilty in 1989 to attempted capital murder and was sentenced to ninety-nine years. A little over a month later he confessed to killing Ewing and Risinger, and over the next two months to killing Martin, which he claimed was unintentional. The prosecution then used a law that had only just come onto the books, allowing a capital charge where murders are committed in separate criminal transactions but pursuant to the same scheme or course of conduct, and indicted him on three counts under it.
The trial opened in March 1990 in Montgomery County, which agreed to prosecute the killings in the other two counties as well. Technicians from the state police laboratory testified that hairs found in his pickup truck were consistent with Ewing's and Risinger's, and another with Martin's. An employer remembered a strange cut on his finger that he blamed on a jar. The transcripts of his confessions had gaps, but he recalled details only the killer could have known, and the prison psychologist Lou Davis testified that he had been afraid of being labeled a serial killer but said he felt guilty and wanted to tell somebody. His lawyer objected that he had been refused an attorney at least twice. On March 17, 1990, he was convicted of the capital murders of Martin and Risinger, the first person convicted under the Texas serial killer statute, and four days later the jury took less than thirty-five minutes to recommend death. His appeal was decided in Corwin v. State in 1993.
He spent eight years on death row and was executed by lethal injection at the Huntsville Unit on December 7, 1998, at forty, the twentieth person executed in Texas that year. In his last statement he thanked two people by name, Sara and Sabrina, told the families he was sorry and hoped they could someday forgive him, and said that the death penalty was not one-sided: "There's pain on both sides."
The killings were committed in February, July and October 1987, although some accounts give the span as February to July or date it to 1988, and the arrest followed the attack on Wendy Gant in October 1988.